Chapter 10: Color

My eyes. I don’t know if I was getting used to seeing my black and black world or if I’d simply lost hope of truly regaining ‘normal’ vision. As spring approached, I saw more and more color. Living things have color. I saw a brilliant red cardinal pecking at a green leaf. They were redder and greener than I remembered. I saw daffodils and tulips getting ready to bloom. And people. Nearly everyone I met was clearly visible, though some were a little more muted than others. Life was color against a colorless void. It was what Annette said about computer color: Black is only black when seen in contrast to the other colors.

I’d long since abandoned my computer. The flat inanimate screen was part of that colorless void. I couldn’t read words or see colors. There was no texture. No depth. No life. Sadly, books were the same. I’d always enjoyed reading. It was calming and peaceful. Television and movies, of course, were out. That eliminated some of our date venues, but we picked up concerts and plays instead. I found that I sometimes saw things Annette and Morgan missed because I saw depth and texture neither of them saw. Annette saw more of that than Morgan. I thought Morgan was becoming even more sensitive to auras, like Mom. It became obvious when she started wearing sunglasses like I wore.

“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we,” she giggled.

“Are you okay, sister?” I asked.

“I’m a little worried. I have this whole world that I see pretty much like everyone else does. And then there’s the world that surrounds it. Glows with color. Like Kendra’s sculpture with glass, I can see through the glow and still see the mundane world. If I lost that ability ... the ability to see through the aura to the person ... I think I’d be unhappy. Like Mom sometimes is.”

“You’d adapt. I am. Even Mom sees inanimate objects perfectly clearly. It’s only people she gets nervous about,” I said.

“That’s why the dark glasses,” Morgan said. “They mute the brightness of the aura so I can see through to the mundane.”

“That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“Yeah. But, you know? People ... Ordinary-sighted people don’t realize how beautiful that mundane world is.”

“I have something to show you all,” Kendra announced when she and Les arrived Saturday. We weren’t posing or modeling, but we were all in the studio helping each other decide what should be submitted and exhibited for our senior projects. We’d been waiting for Kendra so we could go over our plan. Her sudden announcement brought us to a halt and we stopped going through portfolios.

“What’s up?” I asked. Les got busy opening her portfolio on the work table and handed Kendra a canvas board I recognized.

“You gave me this painting so I could experiment with it. And then I was afraid to use it because you painted me and I loved it. But I did it. I’ve been experimenting with a silicone-based casting material. I can’t use it to cast bronze because it has too low a melting point,” Kendra said. “But I was able to cast a mold of your painting.”

“I don’t think bronze would be a good medium for my painting anyway,” I said. “It has texture, but not enough depth for bronze.”

“But it does for paper,” Kendra said. Les handed her a sheet of black paper. “I made this print of your artwork.” I looked back and forth between the original and the print. It was amazing. I could see both clearly. I could see that Morgan was still left out of viewing the paper, but she’d removed her dark glasses and was monitoring each of our auras as we looked at what Kendra had accomplished. She began to smile.

“How did you do this?” Mavis asked. “I mean beyond making the silicone mold.”

“I started thinking about a papermaking class I took years ago,” Kendra said. “I made a slurry and poured it into the mold. I still want to work on the formula for the paper. It was painful to grind up expensive art paper and put it in a blender. Then there was getting the depth of black Arthur uses. I couldn’t use an oil-based ink in the water-based slurry to color the paper. Using watercolor black was too washed out. I finally tried drying it naturally and spraying it with a thin coat of black acrylic—the same paint Arthur used on the original. Sorry, Arthur. I stole some.”

“How?”

“Airbrush. What do you think?”

“It sounds like an awful lot of work,” I said.

“It is really no more intensive than stone lithography. It takes a little longer because of the drying process, but that is unattended. I’m not suggesting that you plan on thousand-piece editions, but you could do truly limited editions and extend your work, much the way I do a reduced scale limited edition of a large bronze,” Kendra said.

I turned her to me and crushed her with a passionate kiss. Les snorted at us.

I looked at the still life I’d set up on a table in the studio. A vase of flowers, an open book, a pair of glasses, a pen, paper borrowed from one of my class notebooks when I was drawing in every class. A brocade tablecloth supported the objects. I ran downstairs and borrowed a lamp from the living room. I was sure it wouldn’t be missed. Right away. While I was there, I fixed myself a cup of coffee and sipped at it as I returned to the studio and continued working on the composition.

Without color, my compositions had become based on depth and texture. I’d painted my last still life all in black and then analyzed where I could optimally put color. When I was very close to the table, I could faintly make out muted color detail based, I assumed, on the light from my own aura or something equally abstruse. I’d mostly accepted Gramma’s suggestion that when I saw color in non-living things without the presence of someone else’s aura, they were probably being illuminated by my own. It was as good an explanation as any. But it didn’t cover every situation.

Like my easel.

Something nagged at me. My easel and palette seemed to always be clear and in color even if I was on the other side of the room and everything between us was black. I wondered if there was a residual aura that remained around my most important objects. My paints were clear to me. My easel, and in fact, any of the paintings that I had done that included color. I could see them clearly. I wonder if it is possible to transfer your aura to an object. I glanced through the archway to our bedroom. The bed, where I met and slept with my lovers, was always visible, even after we changed sheets.

I set my half-empty coffee cup on the table and walked over to the easel. That was it. I had the perfect composition.

I’d never faced my easel with such trepidation. It had always been my friend and refuge. But now, I scarcely knew where to start. I saw the scene in brilliant black and black. I intended to paint it in color. My colors. I kept jars of pure pigments next to me and a dollop of acrylic gel medium in the middle of my palette. I thought of the supersaturated color in Mavis’s photos. Supersaturation in paint resulted from using more pigment than could be fully dissolved in the medium. Starting with the coffee cup, I began to paint.

For many years, I woke up every morning and painted my dreamscapes. I would complete a canvas and sometimes two or three in a morning. When the vision grabbed me, I was obsessed with getting it out. In my black and black paintings, I could complete a painting in a day or two at the most. But dragging this painting out of my head and onto the canvas was a slow and painstaking process. I wasn’t painting what I saw, but rather what I wanted to see. Over the course of a week, the painting gradually took shape. With imagined color and intensity, my still life was a dreamscape in its own right.

I painted other things during that time. And spent hours meeting with Morgan and Les about how to create the exhibition brochure when the bulk of what I was exhibiting couldn’t be photographed and printed. Morgan, Kendra, and I met with Dr. Robinson and Dr. Lowenstein to show what had been accomplished with the printmaking. They were impressed and wanted me to exhibit several with the idea of breaking into the more commercial market of selling prints.

“How about the ones that include color?” Dr. L asked. “Have you figured out a way to reproduce them?” I shook my head. “Well, this is a good step in the right direction, Arthur. You should be proud of the work. Kendra, I never thought you would turn from sculptor to printmaker, but I want you to meet with an attorney to see if your process is patentable. I know you didn’t invent new technology, but there are such things as process patents. I’m sure that when Arthur’s work hits the public market, other artists are going to try doing the same things. It’s natural. But you should try to protect as much of your technique as possible.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lowenstein. I don’t think I’m going to be the primary printmaker. I plan to keep sculpting—especially the glass and bronze fusion pieces. Once the mold has been cast, Arthur can take over casting the paper and painting it. As long as they are all black, he could contract the printmaking,” Kendra said.

“Kendra is an incredible artist in her own right, as well as being a brilliant inventor,” Morgan added. “We don’t plan to let anything interfere with her creating her own art. We’re just going to love her for helping Art.”

“And give her a royalty,” I added. Kendra grinned at me.

And then I went back to the studio and dabbed tiny amounts of nearly pure pigment on my canvas, afraid to make a sweeping stroke for fear of ruining what little I had accomplished so far, but building up the textures I could see with the colors I imagined.

We were just one month from the exhibition. The paintings and prints in my collection had been sent out for framing. A brochure and invitation had been sent to local galleries, media, and the school’s alumni and donor lists. My portion of the exhibition was titled ‘Black Magic—A Post-Digital Art’. We were among the last of the BFA exhibitions that would occur. There were three campus galleries and students were encouraged to share their display space. All semester, BFA exhibitions had been opening every weekend, rotating among the galleries. Kendra, Mavis, and I had claimed the last space and timeslot before graduation. Both Annette and Susan would be doing readings on the weekends. Our friend Leonard was a concert pianist BFA and would do a recital in the gallery.

There was a lot of hype about the BFA exhibitions. By having three to five artists opening every week, there was a constant flow of buyers and critics through the campus. Not everyone had been well-received, but the university had a reputation that continued to draw crowds.

We were getting excited.

“Are you going to exhibit that one, too?” Kendra asked. She’d been in our studio all morning taking a break from plaster and bronze to get her fingers in some clay. For Kendra, molding clay was like doodling. Annette and Morgan were off with Susan and Les to work with one of the English professors to choose passages for their readings. Mavis had told us she was up to her boobs in photo chemicals and probably wouldn’t see us until the weekend.

Something strange had begun to happen as I painted the still life over the past two weeks. I’d begun to see it in color. But my memory told me they weren’t the natural colors of the objects in the still life. I was seeing the colors I’d painted. I’d wandered over to the table one day with Annette nearby. We’d discovered that I could see things more clearly in the light of my lover’s aura. I picked up the coffee cup and turned to my Lady. The cup was illuminated, but the color changed. The two-week-old coffee was murky and dead. The rest of the still life had begun to fade into black again. When I returned the cup to its former location, the colors flashed back into view with even more intensity. My whole family struggled to interpret the phenomenon with no success.

Kendra had been doodling in clay as I painted for the past hour. I finally put my brush down and sighed.

“I don’t know if I should exhibit it. I think it’s finished. What do you think?”

Kendra wiped her hands on a towel and came to stand beside me. She bumped her hips into me a couple of times until I moved back and then she pulled my arms around her and clasped my hands in front.

“Half the people who view this will think it is an intense, bright, and cheerful painting. Not at all like your trompe l’oeil drapery paintings, even though the depth and texture is just as detailed. The other half will consider it a little overdone or possibly even garish.”

“And you?”

“I see the epitome of the artist’s struggle to reconcile his vision of the world with reality. I see the pain from which it arose and the darkness that gave it birth. There. And there. Where colors are lost in the blackness with the foregrounds struggling to illuminate the depths. I see love and passion and desperation. I see you, Arthur. I don’t think you can ask for more.”

During her analysis, she’d pulled my hands under her shirt and began moving them up her torso. I cupped her full round breasts as she finished and she turned her head to kiss me. Kendra and I never shied away from contact or nudity—either when we were alone or with the rest of the group. But we’d seldom been so deliberate in initiating intimacy. We let the kiss deepen as her nipples hardened beneath my fingers and I hardened against her butt.

“You are still my certified interpreter,” I said. “I will exhibit it if you will narrate it.”

“I will narrate it if you will help me get out of my clothes and take me to bed.”

We’d known this was coming for three years. All of us. Kendra was my best friend and even though she had posed nude several times in the company of my lovers and joined in our hugs and kisses, it was the special connection between the two of us that we’d celebrate now. Months before, after Kendra had lain on the daybed with me while Morgan, Annette, and Susan had celebrated in the shower, my lovers had come to me and told me that when the time was right, it would be just Kendra and me together. The rest of my family would not infringe on our moment.

The enforced isolation of the past few months—Kendra’s in the shop and mine in my head—slowed our pace. As I lifted the t-shirt over her head, her lush curves and hard body met my fingers. When my shirt was off, we pressed our chests together and kissed long and lovingly. I led her to my bed and began to pull at her jeans.

“Is it okay, Arthur? To do it in here? Without Morgan and Annette?” Kendra whispered, not resisting as I tugged her jeans and panties down over her hips and placed a kiss on her mons at the tip of her lightning bolt tattoo.

“We talked,” I said. “No guarantee they won’t join us eventually,” I chuckled.

“I can stand that,” she giggled. “Who knows? Maybe Les will join us, too.” She returned my gesture by unfastening my jeans and belt and pulling them down past my rigid cock. We pulled the spread back off the bed and stretched out with each other like we’d done weeks ago.

And we kissed.

I explored the weight and shape of her breasts and her butt, the firm strength of her back, as she began at my hair and moved her hands down my entire body, kneading my flesh as if it was clay she was shaping to her pleasure. I traced the tattoo around her right breast that said Expecto Patronum and kissed the ‘dark mark’ tattoo on her arm. Eventually, we touched each other’s sex, setting off the first electrifying sparks that would culminate in our joining.

Kendra had told me that she and Les loved each other, but were not passionate. I didn’t understand how he could not be passionate with her. It’s not like we were madly banging at each other like a fucking machine, but the depth of her love and excitement were obvious. She was completely engaged with me like she had been the first day I sketched people in class and she posed. She’d become my friend and helped me through some of the darkest times of my life. And if, as Mom and Morgan said, her aura was neutral in color, it was nonetheless bright enough to light my world.

When I’d first met Kendra, her hair was two-toned. She was growing out the bleached blonde and her natural brown emerged from the roots. Now, I kissed and petted her shoulder-length brown hair. I pulled it away from her neck and trailed kisses up to her ear. She sighed and stroked from my face to my chest where she drew circles around my nipple with her finger. Our lips met and then our tongues. And then our eyes.

It was different from looking into Mavis’s eyes. With Mavis, there was a deep burning connection that was almost telepathic. The heat seared my soul and opened dark passages through my brain. Kendra’s eyes were no less intense, but were simply open and receptive. Inviting. Joining. Soft.

She pulled me over her and I rolled between her legs. We were silent as she grasped my cock and led me to her entrance. Once there we simply melted together into one. She was the only woman I’d had intercourse with other than Annette and Morgan. I wanted to feel guilty about that, but I couldn’t. Kendra had been a part of our lives for nearly four years, growing closer to all three of us. Annette and Morgan were her friends, but she was my best friend. She both excited and soothed me as we moved together, first glorying in our union and then losing ourselves in each other’s embrace and kiss.